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Chapter 2
- University of Wisconsin Press
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19 o 2 Sar miento sat at a win dow table at the Café Roy ale watch ing a bare foot pe lado herd a flock of tur keys down the cen ter of Calle de los Pla te ros. The In dian, cinnamon-skinned and mal nour ished with a mop of inky hair, was, like most In dians to Sarmiento’s eyes, of in de ter mi nate age— per haps twenty, per haps sixty. He wore a tat tered, long-tailed shirt, and in ap par ent ig nor ance of a re cently passed city or di nance com mand ing the wear ing of under gar ments, a soiled breech cloth tied around his waist and loosely looped around his gen i tals. The bob ble of his penis was dis grace fully vis ible to pas sersby as he made his way down the nar row road. Ex pertly, he kept the squawk ing tur keys in a straight line with a long stick to rein them in when they began to wan der. The birds were small and stringy, but their plum age was as darkly ir i des cent as a ball gown. Sar miento as sumed the tur keys were on their way to one of the city’s mar kets and that day’s end would find them de feathered, cut up, and boiled be neath a layer of mole po blano. In Eu rope, where Sar miento had lived for the past decade, the in cur sion of the coun try into the city would have been deemed pic tu r esque. But in Ciu dad de Méx ico, the re flec tion of a peas ant in the plate glass win dows of shops that sold French wines and En glish frock coats re proached the pre ten sions of the nou veau riche who shopped there and they were not amused. Even now, a po lice of fi cer—whose blue uni form aped the Pa ri sian gen dar me rie right down to the short cape— bestirred him self from his cor ner post. A mo ment later, the In dian and his birds had been harshly di rected to a side street and away from Sarmiento ’s view. Across the cap i tal the church bells tolled ten. The shops would not open for an other hour. The city would not fully awaken until the sifted 20 The Palace of the Gaviláns gold light that now filled its streets achieved the trans pa rency that made a stroll through them a walk into a dream. Dur ing his exile, Sar miento had often tried to ex plain México’s qual ity of light, but words, in which ever of the four lan guages he spoke, al ways failed him. The light’s lu cid ity was partly a mat ter of al ti tude—at eight thou sand feet the air was so thin that vis i tors gasped for breath upon first ar riv ing. Then too, the city lay at the low est point in a val ley ringed by vol ca noes creat ing a can opy of the sky. What ever the cause, the light poured down with a pur ity that made every ob ject it touched seem both im me di ately present and il lu sory, like some thing si mul ta ne ously seen and re mem bered. This ef fect was height ened by the phan tas ma gor i cal na ture of the city it self. The an cient stones of the Span ish co lo nial city sat upon the even more an cient stones of the Aztec city, Tenochtitlán. The Span ish had razed the Aztecs’ is land cap i tal and dumped its pal aces and tem ples into the vast lake that had ringed it. The great na tive cy presses—ahue huetes— still grew in the park at Cha pul te pec, where they had shaded the sum mer pal ace of the last Aztec em peror. When the light poured through their leaves, it was as if ten thou sand green, trans lu cent eyes looked with un imag in able grief upon the slain city of Tenochtitlán, which the Az tecs had called the navel of the earth. This is what Sar miento had been un able to ex plain to...